On Monday, June 27, 2016 at 7:09:35 AM UTC-7, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: > Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwa...@gmail.com>: > > > On 2016-06-26, BartC <b...@freeuk.com> wrote: > > > >> (Note, for those who don't know (old) Fortran, that spaces and tabs > >> are not significant. So those dots are needed, otherwise "a eq b" > >> would be parsed as "aeqb".) > > > > I've always been baffled by that. > > > > Were there other languages that did something similar? > > In XML, whitespace between tags is significant unless the document type > says otherwise. On the other hand, leading and trailing space in > attribute values is insignificant unless the document type says > otherwise. > > > Why would a language designer think it a good idea? > > > > Did the poor sod who wrote the compiler think it was a good idea? > > Fortran is probably not too hard to parse. XML, on the other hand, is > impossible to parse without the document type at hand. The document type > not only defines the whitespace semantics but also the availability and > meaning of the "entities" (e.g., © for ©). Add namespaces to that, > and the mess is complete. > > > Marko
XML isn't a programming language. I don't think it's relevant to the conversation. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
